Cobalt(II) single-molecule magnets.

This short tutorial review covers recent progress in the field of polynuclear cobalt(ii)-based complexes, which display slow magnetic relaxation at low temperature. Cobalt(ii) single-molecule magnets (SMMs) can display much larger magnetic anisotropies and hence, potentially higher blocking temperatures than SMMs based on ions where the zero-field splitting originates from a second order spin-orbit coupling, such as manganese(iii).